I feel good. No, I will go as far as to say that at this moment I feel great.

And I feel that I owe most of that great feeling to the best weight-loss device I have ever tried, your friend and mine, the sleeve.

To date I have lost 156 lbs, the most I have ever lost at one time and the most I have ever lost in a 9 month period. About 5 years ago, during my 4th and final stint with Weight Watchers I lost 90 lbs over 3 years, clawing uphill every "point" of the way. Unfortunately, after my favorite leader departed, and after quite a long stall that resulted in the scale freezing at 313 lbs and in my resigning to the notion that somehow I was cosmically destined to weigh over 300 lbs for the rest of my life, I quit and gained it all back plus 15 lbs in less than a full year. But until then, that was the most I had ever lost. It felt promising, but simultaneously foreboding. Mostly because as hard as I fought to stay positive & motivated, deep down, I knew the weight would come back... with chains, bats, and buddies.



I'm sure to many of you, this sounds all too familiar. That of course was just one of dozens of "systems", "life-style-changes", "programs", etc that drained me of my fight, my positive emotion, and my money.

Over the years I had considered WLS a few times, even went to a couple of seminars, but I either chickened out after seeing the material explaining what they would be doing to my insides & by the thought of never pigging out again or got turned down by insurance & surgical loan agencies. It was my husband who helped me decide to go through with the sleeve. When the one person who has stood by you for 20 some odd years, has grown up with you, loved you through thick & thin, and has built a life with you hints gently, yet in no uncertain terms, that you aren't the only one who is thread-bare and ready to give up, it shatters your heart into a thousand pieces, but it also gets your attention.

Fast forward through pity-parties, nearly 2 years of therapy, a quack of a diet doctor who with every appointment insisted I stop drinking soda even though I told him at least 5x that I could count on one hand how many sodas I drink a year, losing a year long bout with a low-rent stingy crooked poo-sucking insurance company who promised they would pay for my WLS if I would do my part (which I did) and promptly turned me down anyway, getting over the massive guilt of accepting my husband's generous gift of his 401K to pay for my sleeve so that we wouldn't have to eff with the stupid insurance companies anymore when there were SOOooo many other things that money could have been used for, and here I am.



I am at a weight that my 15 year old son has never known me at and that I haven't been at in almost 19 years.
I am in sizes that I wore in High School, and can wear some of my husband's clothes.
I have an excess of energy, so much in fact that sometimes I can't sleep at night, and I still get up in the morning and go all day without a pot of coffee and a handful of truck stop uppers.
I can fit any restaurant booth, table, chair, stool, or corner (which is a big deal for a reason, but that is another blog).
I can shop almost anywhere and not just one over-priced specialty store managed by a lady with a bug up her bum.
And that's just the things I can think of at the moment.

What has been really neat is that last week, I went to renew my drivers license, and the lady at the DMV remarked with amazement how much I have changed since my last picture. She asked me how I did it. I said, "Change of diet & exercise." Which we all know, is 100% true.
Then that afternoon, I bought a pack of beer for my husband, and the clerk asked me if I was old enough to buy it. I thought he was joking, because I have worked many registers, and that is just something clerks do, so I shook my head no, then laughed and said, "yes, I'm old enough".
He looked at me with a straight face and said, "You don't look old enough."
I said, "I don't?? Well here's my ID.", thinking he was still playing with me and handed him my old license.
He looked at my ID and said skeptically, "This doesn't even look like you."
I chirped, "It's me... over a hundred pounds ago!"
He studied it for a long time, then rang me up. It wasn't till I was in the car that I realized he wasn't joking around with me. I thought to myself that guy must either be near-sighted as Mr. Magoo, or the worst judge of age EVER, but either way, HELLS YEAH! hahahaha
By the way, I'll be 42 in February, twice old enough to buy alcohol.

Anyway... if someone would have told me a year ago that in one year I would reap so many benefits and feel so good, I would have told them to cram it in the cram-hole and to go peddle that poo somewhere else. But I would have had to go find them and apologize, because my life has changed drastically for the better. No, it's not perfect. I won't lie and say I haven't thought at all about Christmas cookies and chocolate oranges, and this time of year always gives me the blues anyway, but I haven't felt the need to go out of my way to get or to bake the goodies. In fact, I don't feel like I need them at all, and if I did, I wouldn't feel guilty about savoring a small indulgence and that in itself feels good. Control and results.

Right now, I am happy, and I must say, it feels pretty dang fantastic.